(Credit: John Burek)
TAIPEI—At a prebriefing at Computex, beleaguered chip maker Intel didn’t have big CPU news to share around new-to-market silicon. It touted its design wins and positive reception for its “Arrow Lake-H” mobile CPUs, and its earlier (April) launch of its intriguing Core 200S Boost. Core 200S Boost is a performance-enhancement initiative for its latest-gen desktop K-class chips (like the Core Ultra 9 285K) that enables single-click memory overclocking, power-settings tweaks, and clock-speed upticks that nonetheless keep users within warranty. (Given Core 200S’s reputation as a bit of a performance fizzle for PC gamers, this is a clear response to that.)
However, one interesting development: Next-gen “Panther Lake” (which should be better known, when it launches, as Intel’s Core Ultra 300) emerged here as working silicon, shown for the first time running commercial software. At a private suite briefing, Intel showed off two early-silicon validation platforms in open-top desktop cases, as well as a small-form-factor development kit.
When’s Panther Lake Coming?
According to Intel, Panther Lake should be entering full production in the first half of 2025, with the expected launch of the new chips in the first systems in early 2026. The core design in Panther Lake, according to the company, will share much with Arrow Lake-H, but the efficiency story should be closer to that of "Lunar Lake," the Core Ultra 200V chips that are showing up in many recent long-running ultraportable laptops.
(Credit: John Burek)Panther Lake will support LPDDR5 memory, and its integrated graphics (IGP) performance, according to the company, will approach that of Lunar Lake, and be based on a new IGP design. Based on Intel’s upcoming 18A node, Panther Lake is poised to be a key advance for Intel, assuming it goes off well.
Three Samples of Live Panthers
In one of the larger reference platforms, on its chassis-attached screen, Intel showed an LLM being run under the umbrella of the old Windows Clippy in an AI workload. The other system was running DaVinci Resolve, and the Panther chip was being shown running effects and adding titling to a piece of footage. The AI workload and the DaVinci effects ran smoothly, but we could only say so anecdotally; no performance numbers were shared.
(Credit: John Burek)
(Credit: John Burek)We also saw a development-kit desktop, along the lines of small form factor PCs from companies like Shuttle or ECS, based on Panther Lake. The two much larger reference platforms were running on development motherboards with active cooling, like so...
(Credit: John Burek)This dev kit model would seem to be a more thermally constrained design. We saw it applying effects to an image in the popular media editor Topaz AI, shown below.
(Credit: John Burek)Intel also showed off a handful of early OEM Panther Lake laptop chassis from design partners including Compal, Wistron, and Eventec. These are all thin-and-light laptops of the kind that have tended to show up as Lunar Lake models.
(Credit: John Burek)More details are expected later this year, as Panther Lake gets closer to launch; we’d expect a lot more details, if not outright testing samples, by CES 2026.